“A compelling look at how New York City influenced and inspired this iconic form of American popular entertainment.”

From September 21, 2012, to February 3, 2013, the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture (BGC) will present Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010, an exhibition that uses New York City as a lens through which to explore the extraordinary development and spectacular pageantry of the American circus. Through a wide variety of ephemera, images, and artifacts, the exhibition documents the history of the circus in the city, from the seminal equestrian displays of the late eighteenth century through the iconic late nineteenth-century American railroad circus to the Big Apple Circus of today. From humble beginnings, the circus grew into the most popular form of entertainment in the United States. By the turn of the twentieth century, New York City was its most important market and the place where cutting-edge circus performances and exhibitions were introduced to the nation.

The exhibition begins by looking at how the advent and growth of the American circus paralleled New York City’s rise as a cultural capital during the nineteenth century. This story began in the fall of 1793, when John Bill Ricketts, a Scotsman, opened the first circus on Greenwich Street with performances that primarily consisted of displays of equestrian skill. In the decades that followed, a variety of transitory circuses and menageries sprang up to entertain the burgeoning population. By mid-century, more permanent circus venues featuring a mix of equestrian, animal, and acrobatic acts were established. Although a succession of influential impresarios, such as Dan Rice and Lewis B. Lent, were transforming the circus business in the United States, no figure was more important to the New York’s emerging popular entertainment industry than Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810–1891). Loans from the Barnum Museum illustrate the breadth of his endeavors, from his early years with Barnum’s American Museum to his triumphant entry into the circus business in the early 1870s. Advertising and artifacts from this era demonstrate how the American circus evolved from modest beginnings into the celebrated and massive railroad circuses of the late nineteenth century and reveal the signature role that New York City played in this process.

“Grand Procession of the Steam Calliope Drawn by a Team of Six Elephants in the City of New York. Now Attached to Sand’s, Nathan’s & Co.s American & English Circus.”
1858
Inscription: “Camden Monday Oct. 11th”
Color lithograph poster
Sarony, Major & Knapp, New York
301⁄2 × 401⁄2 in. (77.5 × 102.9 cm)
The New-York Historical Society

Portrait of Mr Van Amburgh, As He Appeared with His Animals at the London Theatres
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802–1873)
1846–47
Oil on canvas
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1977.14.61